WALLDORF — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced that the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has selected advanced disaster risk management system EDiSON for use in the Solomon Islands.
Put sustainability at the core of your business with AI-driven solutions
The system was developed by SAP Japan and INSPIRATION PLUS, a venture from Oita University focused on disaster prevention.
EDiSON, which runs on SAP Business Technology Platform, exemplifies how intelligent enterprise technology can be harnessed to address global challenges such as cyclones (typhoons) and floods. It integrates diverse types of information, including real-time, visual meteorological data and historical data records, to drive predictive insights and smarter operations assisted by SAP Business AI and machine learning.
These predictions offer authorities a vital tool for delivering faster response times and mitigating damage in the event of a natural disaster. This includes forecasting terrain damage, dispatching emergency services to affected areas and supporting decision-making in issuing evacuation advisories. The Solomon Islands initiative is envisioned as a blueprint for other small island developing states, showcasing how cutting-edge technology can democratize disaster resilience.
“EDiSON represents a leap forward in how science and technology can empower vulnerable communities,” UNESCO Chief of Disaster Risk Reduction Soichiro Yasukawa said. “By integrating AI and real-time data, we are not only improving early warning capabilities but also building a foundation for long-term resilience and sustainable development.”
The project, part of UNESCO’s Disaster Prevention Strengthening Program, will be operational in 2026. It aims to establish a scalable, data-driven model for disaster preparedness and responses of small island nations that face the increasing severity of natural disasters driven by climate change. The Solomon Islands, located in the South Pacific Ocean, face frequent threats from earthquakes, tsunamis, cyclones, droughts and flooding. EDiSON will serve as a transformative solution to enhance national preparedness and response capabilities.
EDiSON integrates static and real-time dynamic data from government, municipal and private sector sources. The system delivers predictive insights and real-time visibility into emerging disaster risks. This empowers authorities to issue timely evacuation orders and make informed decisions that protect lives and infrastructure.
Why EDiSON? Proven Performance and Scalable Sustainability
“This project exemplifies SAP’s commitment to using technology to empower resilient communities,” said Sophia Mendelsohn, chief sustainability and commercial officer at SAP SE. “EDiSON is a powerful example of how our cloud platform and AI capabilities can be tailored to meet the needs of communities facing real-world challenges. We’re proud to support UNESCO in bringing this innovation to the Solomon Islands and beyond.”
UNESCO’s selection of EDiSON was driven by the system’s proven track record in Japan—a country renowned for its advanced disaster management systems. The system’s ability to overcome traditional barriers such as fragmented data, limited analytical capacity and underutilization in field operations makes it especially valuable for resource-constrained nations such as the Solomon Islands. EDiSON’s modular design helps ensure scalability and adaptability, enabling governments to deploy sophisticated disaster management tools without requiring extensive budgets or technical expertise.
WALLDORF — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced a new collaboration with France’s AI sector, which includes new and expanded partnerships with Bleu, Capgemini and Mistral AI.
SAP Sovereign Cloud: Embrace the cloud without compromise
The collaboration will combine SAP enterprise application expertise with France’s vibrant AI ecosystem to create secure, scalable, AI-driven sovereign cloud solutions that protect data and intellectual property while advancing Europe’s digital transformation. The announcement took place at the Summit on European Digital Sovereignty in Berlin, where France and Germany emphasized strengthening European innovation and competitiveness.
“Europe’s competitiveness depends on its ability to innovate without compromise by combining technological excellence with full digital sovereignty,” said Christian Klein, CEO of SAP SE. “By joining forces with France’s world-class AI ecosystem, SAP is helping to build a trusted digital foundation for Europe where innovation is open, data is protected and technology truly serves people and progress.”
Bleu and Delos Cloud: Franco-German collaboration supporting European digital sovereignty
In a volatile and dynamic geopolitical climate, Bleu and Delos Cloud have established a robust Franco-German alliance to safeguard Europe’s digital infrastructure. Bleu and Delos Cloud signed a mutual assistance commitment for technical and operational cooperation in extensive crisis and emergency scenarios. This includes technical and operational cooperation to help ensure rapid, coordinated crisis response, even in extreme scenarios, such as military conflict or cyberattacks.
This partnership includes enabling cross-border capabilities for early detection, analysis, defense and remediation of cyber incidents. By working together, Bleu and Delos Cloud strengthen Europe’s capabilities for resilience and digital sovereignty, supporting both crisis prevention and long-term stability.
Together with SAP, authorities and governments, Bleu and Delos Cloud are ready to make a central contribution to Europe’s digital sovereignty, helping ensure that critical infrastructure remains secure, resilient and under European control. Further details are available here.
Capgemini: Driving Europe’s AI-driven digital and technology sovereignty
SAP and Capgemini are deepening their strategic partnership to strengthen cybersecurity and accelerate sovereign agentic AI-driven enterprise transformation solutions across Europe. Under the Franco-German industry alliance, both companies will sign a cooperation agreement and launch a Sovereign Technology Partnership, providing European organizations access to the spectrum of enterprise data management and migration services, cloud infrastructure and automation platforms, and agentic AI capabilities for European industries – including those in the public sector and regulated industries. By setting a new benchmark for trusted, compliant and resilient digital infrastructure, SAP and Capgemini are helping enable European organizations to innovate securely and independently. Further details are available here.
Mistral AI: Alliance for European sovereign AI
SAP and Mistral AI today announced an expansion of their strategic partnership to accelerate digital transformation and strengthen Europe’s technological sovereignty in artificial intelligence. The collaboration will provide organizations with the first full sovereign AI stack for Europe:
Bringing together Mistral AI and SAP products:SAP will provide Mistral AI’s frontier AI, including Le Chat, through the sovereign AI Foundation on SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP). This joint offering will bring together the strengths of enterprise software and AI to deliver sovereign cloud solutions for Europe on sovereign AI data center. Mistral AI Studio will be integrated into AI Foundation, an SAP solution empowering customers and partners to build and deploy sovereign cloud applications and AI agents securely, compliantly and at scale within their own environments.
Co-developing sovereign customer solutions: SAP and Mistral AI will jointly design and develop industry-specific AI applications that leverage SAP’s technology leadership and Mistral AI’s expertise to solve complex engineering and R&D challenges and unlock new business value.
This joint effort is the next step to enabling sovereign AI across the continent on European terms. AI Foundation in SAP Business Technology Platform serves as an integration layer that offers SAP Business AI across virtually any infrastructure. Mistral AI and SAP lay the foundation together with partners and endorsed by governments for scalable and compliant AI solutions in Europe, covering sovereign AI from the hardware to the platform and applications to the user interface.
A dedicated sovereignty pillar will serve European public services and regulated sectors, starting in Germany — and extendible to a wide variety of industries. By integrating Mistral’s AI capabilities into SAP’s cloud infrastructure for Europe, the partnership enables secure, scalable AI deployments tailored to local requirements.
A unified vision for Europe’s digital sovereignty
These partnerships form a key part of SAP’s broader SAP Sovereign Cloud solutions to strengthen Europe’s digital sovereignty and unlock the potential of AI. SAP is accelerating its investment in European sovereignty, deploying the SAP Cloud Infrastructure service across local data centers and allocating over €20 billion to sovereign cloud and AI solutions. By combining trusted governance and rigorous compliance with the ability to maintain control over data and assets while deploying some of the best available technologies on European terms, SAP is creating a resilient digital foundation for governments, public institutions and enterprises under European control.
As a global leader in enterprise applications and business AI, SAP (NYSE:SAP) stands at the nexus of business and technology. For over 50 years, organizations have trusted SAP to bring out their best by uniting business-critical operations spanning finance, procurement, HR, supply chain, and customer experience. For more information, visit www.sap.com.
Sign up for the SAP News Center newsletter and get stories and highlights delivered straight to your inbox each week
Note to editors: To preview and download broadcast-standard stock footage and press photos digitally, please visit www.sap.com/photos. On this platform, you can find high resolution material for your media channels.
For customers interested in learning more about SAP products: Global Customer Center: +49 180 534-34-24 United States Only: 1 (800) 872-1SAP (1-800-872-1727)
At the Franco-German EU Summit on Digital Sovereignty in Berlin, SAP announced an expansion of its partnership with Mistral AI, marking a pivotal moment for European innovation in artificial intelligence (AI).
SAP Joins Forces with France’s AI Ecosystem to Power Europe’s Sovereign Digital Future
Here, we explore the main takeaways from the partnership and its broader implications.
Q: What is the main objective of the SAP-Mistral AI partnership?
A: SAP and Mistral AI are strengthening their alliance by combining SAP’s enterprise expertise with Mistral AI’s cutting-edge AI technology. The partnership is designed to accelerate the rollout of AI-driven solutions across industries, echoing the pace of major U.S. tech partnerships. By jointly offering frontier AI from Mistral AI with SAP’s leading enterprise platform, the collaboration is making sovereign AI a practical reality for Europe—grounded in a shared commitment to innovation and digital sovereignty.
Q: What are the technical highlights of the partnership?
A: The partnership builds on SAP’s locally hosted AI, introduced in 2024, which already allows customers to access leading AI models on SAP-operated infrastructure. The next phase will see SAP providing Mistral AI’s frontier models and products through a sovereign AI foundation on SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP). Mistral AI Studio and Le Chat will be integrated into SAP’s AI Foundation, enabling customers and partners to build and deploy sovereign AI applications and AI agents within their own environments, without compromising data sovereignty or regulatory compliance.
SAP and Mistral AI will jointly design and develop industry-specific AI applications to unlock new business value. A dedicated sovereignty pillar will serve European public services and regulated sectors, starting in Germany, and can be extended to any industry. Both partners will also co-sell on joint opportunities.
Q: Why is this partnership strategically important for Europe?
A: Both SAP and Mistral AI emphasize that Europe’s competitiveness depends on its ability to innovate without compromise, combining technological excellence with full digital sovereignty. The partnership is designed to ensure that European organizations can leverage cutting-edge AI while retaining control over their data, infrastructure, and future direction.
Get news and stories delivered straight to your inbox each week via the SAP News Center newsletter
Today, at Microsoft Ignite in San Francisco, SAP and Microsoft unveiled plans to expand their longstanding partnership with the launch of SAP Business Data Cloud (SAP BDC) Connect for Microsoft Fabric.
SAP BDC: Amplify the value of AI with your most powerful data
The new capability simplifies access to semantically rich SAP data products through bi-directional, zero-copy sharing with Microsoft Fabric, enabling enterprises to gain instant access to trusted, business-ready insights for advanced analytics and AI.
“We are excited about continuing to strengthen our partnership with Microsoft to create more value for our customers,” said Muhammad Alam, member of the Executive Board of SAP SE, SAP Product & Engineering. “By bringing SAP Business Data Cloud and Microsoft Fabric closer together, our customers can seamlessly leverage the power of data to generate real business value through AI and analytics.”
“Organizations across every industry are accelerating their AI transformation by bringing together data from operations, analytics, and applications,” said Scott Guthrie, executive vice president, Microsoft Cloud and AI. “With SAP Business Data Cloud and Microsoft Fabric, we’re delivering a trusted foundation for analytics and AI, and helping our customers move faster, make smarter decisions, and turn insight into real business outcomes.”
Unlocking the true potential of your enterprise data
SAP BDC Connect for Microsoft Fabric empowers organizations to fully harness their data and applications by delivering secure, rapid access to SAP data products at scale—without the delays of data replication.
Through bi-directional, zero-copy sharing between SAP Business Data Cloud and Microsoft Fabric, customers can realize use cases that previously required moving and managing copies of data. SAP data products will be seamlessly integrated into Microsoft OneLake, Microsoft Fabric’s AI ready data lake, and data sets shared from Microsoft OneLake will also be available in SAP BDC to supplement intelligent applications.
By utilizing Fabric’s data engineering, data warehousing, and Power BI capabilities, organizations can effectively integrate SAP data with their broader ecosystem, establishing a unified foundation for their enterprise data. OneLake integration into Microsoft AI Foundry can also help customers leverage their SAP data in building AI applications, and as OneLake is built into Microsoft 365, hundreds of millions of users can get secure access to their SAP data through the products they use every day such as Excel and Teams.
Accelerating business insights and AI with SAP and Microsoft Fabric
SAP BDC Connect for Microsoft Fabric enables a unified data foundation that helps organizations get insights faster and accelerate their AI strategy. Through this bi-directional integration, customers can:
Build a semantically rich data foundation on harmonized SAP and non-SAP data
Perform advanced analytics and interact with enterprise data in natural language with Copilot in Microsoft Power BI.
Develop intelligent AI applications and agents grounded in mission-critical business data using Fabric data agents, Copilot studio, and AI Foundry
Enable multi-agent collaboration between M365 Copilot and Joule, leveraging a unified enterprise data and productivity platform to provide a seamless experience for business users
Availability
SAP Business Data Cloud Connect for Microsoft Fabric is planned to be generally available in Q3 2026.
Irfan Khan is president and chief product officer for SAP Data and Analytics. Arun Ulag is president of Azure Data at Microsoft.
Subscribe to the SAP News Center newsletter to get highlights and stories delivered each week
A pivotal question about how finance can be used to address the challenges of our time has been discussed at COP30 in Belém, Brazil: how can sustained climate finance be implemented to drive meaningful environmental impact?
It’s a mindset shift SAP is already embracing to help our customers build genuine business resilience. It lies not just in reducing our own emissions, but in actively supporting and financing the restoration of the natural systems that underpin global economic stability.
The business case for nature-based initiatives
The interdependence between business and nature is no longer theoretical. Today, US$44 trillion of economic value generation depends directly on nature. From food systems that sustain people to water resources, natural capital forms the invisible infrastructure of the global economy. Yet this foundation is eroding rapidly, creating systemic risks that no company can ignore.
For SAP, investing in forest ecosystems is not just philanthropy, it’s risk management. By financing and supporting nature-based climate projects, we can protect ourselves and our stakeholders against the loss of natural capital while strengthening our position as a sustainability leader. These investments provide opportunities to regenerate the ecosystems that our economies and societies depend on for food, water, medicine, and sustainable growth.
A comprehensive approach to net-zero
In our mission to help the world run better and improve people’s lives, SAP has committed to achieving net-zero emissions along our entire value chain by 2030, aligned with the science-based 1.5°C future outlined in the Paris Agreement negotiated at COP21 in in 2015, 20 years ahead of our original target. This accelerated timeline reflects both urgency and ambition.
Until 2030, SAP is committed to financing projects that reduce and remove more CO2 from the atmosphere than our own operations—including scope 1 and 2 emissions plus business travel—produce each year. This commitment means we’re taking responsibility for the impact of our business operations while we scale up our decarbonization efforts.
This strategy follows a clear hierarchy: avoid and reduce emissions first, then neutralize what remains. We’re working to reduce gross greenhouse gas emissions by 90% across our value chain on a market-based accounting approach. The remaining emissions, no more than 10%, in line with Science Based Targets initiative standards, will be neutralized through high-quality, verified carbon removal projects spanning both nature-based and engineered solutions.
Explore how we embed economic, social, and environmental impacts into our business decisions and practices
Matthias Medert, global head of Sustainability at SAP SE, says: “Our reduction efforts have earned SAP’s inclusion in the EU Paris-Aligned Benchmarks, giving investors confidence in our approach and demonstrating that rigorous action to tackle global issues strengthens rather than compromises business performance.”
Nature-based carbon finance in action
Since 2012, SAP has been building one of the most comprehensive corporate reforestation programs in the technology sector. To date, we have planted 20.51 million trees towards our commitment in 2024 to plant 25 million trees by 2030 while restoring more land than our offices and data centers occupy.
These aren’t isolated exercises. Through long-term investment in the Livelihoods Carbon Funds, SAP is supporting comprehensive 10- to 20-year projects that combine reforestation, forest protection, improved forest management, rural energy, and agroforestry initiatives implemented directly with local communities. These initiatives restore degraded natural ecosystems, improve the livelihoods of rural populations, and facilitate transitions to efficient rural energy and regenerative agriculture.
In addition to this, SAP is working with the Fundação Amazônia Sustentável (FAS) to help advance its mission to secure the Amazon rainforest’s future. By tracking 15 strategic KPIs—including deforestation rates and production chain revenue—and sharing data with stakeholders through the SAP Sustainability Control Tower solution, FAS is steering its efforts with accurate and reliable ESG data, positively impacting preservation efforts in the Amazon, home to not only the greatest fresh water reserve on the Earth, but around 390 billion trees and to 2.2 million indigenous people across 400 ethnic groups whose traditional knowledge is essential to the conservation of local and global biodiversity.
Partnerships amplifying impact
As a member of the 1t.org corporate alliance managed by the World Economic Forum, SAP is contributing to the collective goal of conserving and restoring multiple ecosystems around the world, supporting projects in over 25 countries, including Brazil, Madagascar, and the Philippines.
Technology can drive indirect reforestation as well. Through a partnership with ECOSIA, the not-for-profit search engine, every 50 searches made by SAP employees support the planting of new trees and investments in sustainable developments. This partnership has resulted in over 760,000 trees planted to date, while employees conduct their work and maintain their privacy through anonymized search queries.
Beyond nature-based solutions, we have partnered with Climeworks, investing in engineered carbon removal through its Direct Air Capture (DAC) technology. This diversified portfolio approach helps ensure that we’re supporting the full spectrum of solutions needed.
Connecting to COP30 and the Tropical Forest Forever Facility
SAP’s approach to climate finance aligns powerfully with emerging global frameworks, particularly the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF) initiative, a top financing priority for Brazil’s COP30 presidency. The TFFF, formally launched last week at COP30 in Belém, is designed to provide long-term, predictable financing for conserving and expanding tropical and subtropical moist broadleaf forests.
This initiative reflects a critical evolution in climate finance thinking. Nearly 100 countries, representing two-thirds of global greenhouse gas emissions, have submitted or announced new Nationally Determined Contribution targets that include strategies to safeguard forests. SAP’s multi-year investments in the Livelihoods Carbon Funds demonstrate the kind of long-term, community-centered approach that the COP30 presidency seeks to scale globally. Our experience shows that when corporations commit to sustained financing with integrity and transparency, the impacts multiply: carbon is sequestered, biodiversity rebounds, communities build resilience, and businesses thrive.
Corporate action beyond the value chain
Provided it doesn’t undermine current corporate decarbonization programs, the financial muscle of corporations can bridge critical gaps in parts of the world where funds aren’t sufficiently available to restore ecosystems and build strong, durable economies and livelihoods.
Sustained corporate financial contributions provide quantifiable benefits to strengthen business resilience beyond SAP’s own value chain, delivering positive impacts for local and global populations and for biodiversity. Through collaboration, transparency, and technology, we’re proving that climate action isn’t just compatible with long-term business success, it’s essential to it.
The question for business leaders isn’t whether to invest in climate finance, but how quickly they can scale their commitments. The resilience of our businesses, our economies, and our planet depends on the actions we take today.
Agentic AI is everywhere, and it holds the massive potential to transform the way we work, enhance efficiency, and amplify value — all while simplifying our daily tasks.
Agentic AI is transforming the way we work, and SAP Signavio helps you maximize AI agent impact
The autonomy of AI agents in decision-making and innovative problem-solving is what makes this disruptive technology so attractive to companies, yet also one that demands focus and clarity.
Organizations need to understand where it is appropriate to deploy AI agents while ensuring they behave as intended: staying within their operational scope, using only authorized data, and maintaining compliance with the company’s guidelines and regulations.
If in the world of espionage, agents would normally operate in the shadows, in the corporate world, companies need to ensure that AI agents operate in plain sight. Their behavior should be transparent, measurable, and always under control.
As organizations scale their use of agentic AI, the specter of a new challenge emerges: understanding where exactly in their processes agents should be applied, if they are acting the way they are supposed to, and what their impact and cost really are. After all, AI agents are a business resource like any other, and should always be governed by an organization’s leadership, in alignment with that organization’s goals.
This is where agent mining capabilities in SAP Signavio solutions come into play, bringing visibility, accountability, and continuous optimization to the growing ecosystem of AI-driven process transformation.
The problem: invisible autonomy in enterprise AI
AI agents become more autonomous — and sometimes more ambiguous — as they learn and evolve. Their decisions happen in milliseconds, driven by complex reasoning that can appear as an invisible black box to end users.
Without transparency, organizations risk blind automation, which means agents operate efficiently on paper but unpredictably in practice, potentially introducing errors, inefficiencies, or unnecessary costs.
At the same time, agents operating visibly allow organizations to see and learn from the agents’ behavior, potentially revealing new approaches, creative solutions to existing problems, or unexpected positive outcomes.
The solution: AI Agent mining
Agent mining enables organizations to understand and optimize the behavior of AI agents operating across their business processes. Agent mining in SAP Signavio solutions provides the ability to:
Trace agent behavior to see how agents make decisions, navigate process steps, and adapt to different contexts
Analyze impact and measure the agents’ influence on key metrics like process time, accuracy, and compliance
Monitor cost by tracking computational or LLM-related expenses, helping ensure cost-efficient performance
Benchmark performance by comparing outcomes of agent runs to identify areas for refinement
But it’s also more than just a monitoring tool. AI agent mining is an intelligence layer for the AI workforce. By transforming invisible actions into measurable insights, it empowers organizations to:
Increase transparency into agent behavior and decision logic
Control operational costs by understanding and optimizing LLM usage
Ensure compliance through auditable decision trails
Continuously improve performance by learning from live agent execution
Measure true business value of AI automation, not just efficiency metrics
Agent mining from SAP Signavio can extend from Joule Agents built by SAP to third-party or custom-built AI agents, offering a unified lens across an organization’s AI landscape.
A broader vision: AI agent excellence
Unless we’re watching the Mission: Impossible franchise, no one wants to see rogue agents on the loose, which is why agent mining is just one of four pillars under SAP Signavio’s comprehensive approach to AI agent excellence. The pillars that help ensure intelligent agents are not just deployed, but deployed intelligently, include:
Agent discovery: Identifying the right processes and opportunities where AI agents can drive the greatest impact
Agent context: Providing agents with the right process knowledge and compliance parameters to act responsibly and efficiently
Agent mining: As outlined above, observing and analyzing how agents actually behave in operation
Agent value impact: Quantifying the business value that agents deliver, such as efficiency gains, cost savings, or improved customer experience
Together, these pillars ensure that organizations not only automate processes but continuously learn from and improve their performance. The world is not enough; it’s critical to have both working in sync.
As SAP Signavio General Manager Dr. Gero Decker shared, “AI agents represent a fundamentally new paradigm, and a key question remains: How should we perceive them? Should we view AI agents as advanced technical constructs or as non-human humans? It’s a complex question that organizations must address as they deploy AI agents at scale.”
“At SAP Signavio, we are preparing for the future by focusing on the organizational and process dimensions of agentic AI adoption,” he said. “Our AI agent excellence approach aims to ensure that AI agents are integrated seamlessly, efficiently, and compliantly into the broader enterprise. In this rapidly evolving landscape, no company can afford to stand still. Our vision is to be an engine for innovation and reinvention, helping companies grow and adapt.”
SAP Signavio solutions can empower organizations to ensure their AI agents are not only effective but also transparent and accountable, paving the way for smarter, more strategic automation — in other words, AI agent excellence.
Lucas de Boer is a Global Marketing program lead for SAP Signavio.
Sign up for the SAP News Center newsletter for weekly highlights and news
We’ve made phenomenal progress embedding AI across the suite. By the end of 2025, we will have 400 SAP Business AI use cases delivered in our solutions, including 40 Joule Agents, building on 2,100 Joule Skills. Our existing more than 300 use cases translate into 441 million EUR value add for a company with 10 billion EUR annual revenue.
Advancements in AI agents, data, and platform capabilities equip developers with the tools to drive business transformation
This month at SAP TechEd Berlin, we announced a wave of SAP Business AI innovations all built on the same technology foundation that powers our embedded AI capabilities that we are now delivering to our customers and partners, allowing them to add even more value in the future.
We showed how the future of enterprise software is built on an AI-native architecture, powered by SAP app, data, and AI foundation. With this approach, we are enabling a platform shift across the tech stack in a non-disruptive fashion, empowering developers to work faster and smarter using the frameworks and tools of their choice.
SAP HANA Cloud and SAP Business Data Cloud: powering our AI-native future
SAP HANA Cloud is the database for SAP’s AI-native software architecture and the foundation of our broader data fabric strategy. At SAP TechEd, we announced new AI capabilities for SAP HANA Cloud that spur AI innovation.
For example, Model Context Protocol (MCP) support for SAP HANA Cloud is now generally available. This provides direct access to rich multi-model engines. Agents can be grounded in full enterprise data context: navigating relationships across customers and suppliers, understanding geographic dependencies through spatial data, and performing semantic searches through vector embeddings — all within a single in-memory engine.
We’re also expanding SAP HANA Cloud knowledge graph engine capabilities (Q1 2026) so customers can automatically generate knowledge graphs from SAP HANA Cloud metadata. What used to take weeks of manual modeling can now happen automatically in minutes. But that’s not all. We’re also enabling agentic memory in SAP HANA Cloud. With long-term memory, AI agents can memorize past inputs and decisions — learning and remembering just like humans — and become continuously smarter.
These advances show that SAP HANA Cloud is truly powering an AI-native future. Read more here.
Bringing together the power of SAP BDC and Snowflake
We are bringing the power of Snowflake together with SAP Business Data Cloud (SAP BDC), calling it SAP Snowflake. This partnership enables zero copy data sharing with Snowflake via SAP BDC Connect.
Enterprises already using Snowflake today can leverage SAP BDC Connect to integrate their existing instances of Snowflake with SAP BDC, giving them seamless, real-time access to combined, semantically rich SAP with non-SAP data in SAP BDC. SAP Snowflake will be made generally available in Q1 2026, and SAP BDC Connect for Snowflake in H1 2026. Find more information here.
SAP-RPT-1: a new category of AI models
One of our most exciting announcements at SAP TechEd was the launch of our first enterprise relational foundation model SAP-RPT-1, pronounced: “rapid one.”
Businesses run on structured data. But large language models (LLMs) struggle with a general understanding of table structures and associated semantics. This requires the use of machine learning, or “narrow AI,” for tasks like classification, regression, and more. But classical machine learning necessitates training a model on each task, which easily can lead to hundreds of separate models.
SAP-RPT-1 puts them all into one single, pre-trained model that understands relational business data and predicts business outcomes. Unlike language, image, or video models, SAP-RPT-1 accurately predicts business based on tabular data such as payment delays, supplier risks, upsell opportunities, customer churn risk, and more.
We believe that SAP-RPT-1 is a super capable foundation model today. It provides up to 2x better prediction quality compared to narrow models and 3.5x better prediction quality as compared to LLMs. Dive deeper in this SAP Community blog.
SAP-RPT-1 comes in three versions. SAP-RPT-1-small is for super-fast predictions and SAP-RPT-1-large is for highest accuracy. Both will be generally available in Q4 2025 in the generative AI hub in AI Foundation. SAP-RPT-1-OSS is the open-source version, available in Hugging Face and GitHub.
You can test SAP-RPT-1 today with your data or our use case data samples via no-code UI or via API in the new SAP-RPT-1 playground, an intuitive and interactive space to test for free and open to everyone Access the playground at rpt.cloud.sap and learn more about new models here.
We are continuously adding new capabilities to AI Foundation and models to the generative AI hub, empowering developers to experiment with orchestration tools and leading models to scale AI development and productization across SAP and non-SAP environments. For example, Perplexity is now generally available in the generative AI hub, so users can correlate business data with external data from the internet. Evaluation Services and Prompt Optimizer, in close collaboration with NotDiamond, are now also generally available in AI Foundation, freeing up users to adopt the most appropriate model for their use cases without the need for rewriting prompts. Read more here.
Digital sovereignty made in Germany, for Europe
Digital sovereignty is becoming increasingly important, reflecting the need for regional AI services that align with local regulations, standards, and values. As an example, Europe will benefit from its own strong, trustworthy infrastructure to support innovation, data protection, and ethical AI.
AI Foundation, including various models and all the services we offer, is already available on our own cloud infrastructure. As a next step, we are expanding our SAP Cloud Infrastructure offering in our SAP data center in Walldorf, Germany, to Deutsche Telekom through the Industrial AI Cloud project, providing secure, high-performance infrastructure for AI innovations across public institutions, defense, and society. SAP delivers SAP Cloud Infrastructure, SAP Business Technology Platform, and applications — including our AI Foundation with frontier AI from Mistral, Cohere, and others — on Telekom’s Munich data center. Both companies uphold the highest standards of data protection, security, and reliability.
This marks a milestone as more European companies join the Industrial AI Cloud project, advancing applied AI across Europe with trusted, business-embedded solutions that unlock the full potential of industry data. See the announcement here.
Enabling customers to build, extend, share, and orchestrate AI agents
To help manage Joule Agents and Joule skills, we have introduced the concept of AI Assistants — role-based AI teammates, accessed through Joule — like a financial assistant that brings together agents for cash collection, treasury, and more. We will provide AI Assistants in Joule for every core business role, offering our users an agentic experience like never before.
Out-of-the-box Joule Agents are powerful, but we know that every company has unique requirements. We believe AI should adapt to users’ systems, not the other way around, so we are enabling them to use Joule Studio to extend SAP’s pre-built agents with custom fields, tools, and reasoning logic while retaining all the deeply grounded integration capabilities SAP provides. Joule Studio also provides low-code tools to build custom agents that integrate with all other Joule Agents, Joule skills, and SAP BDC.
Using a low-code approach, users can build Joule Agents visually with natural language and drag-and-drop. But we also want to meet the needs of developers who want ultimate flexibility. Our pro-code approach gives developers the freedom to build agents using the agentic framework of their choice — for example, LangGraph, CrewAI, Google’s Agent Development Kit, and more. SAP Cloud SDK for AI now supports agentic development, ensuring these pro-code agents can be seamlessly integrated and giving developers the best of both worlds: deep integration and full flexibility.
No matter how you want to build agents, an important question is how to integrate them into the larger ecosystem beyond SAP. We’re making Joule Agents fully compatible with the agent-to-agent (A2A) protocol soon, so agents can discover and collaborate with each other.
A2A exposes rich semantics describing an agent’s capabilities, allowing both SAP and third-party agents to work together seamlessly. We are collaborating with partners — AWS, Google, Microsoft, ServiceNow, and more — to standardize this protocol for full interoperability. This capability will allow Joule to orchestrate tasks across multiple agents, both SAP and non-SAP, increasing automation and productivity across the enterprise. Read more here.
To manage and govern agents across the enterprise, SAP LeanIX agent hub is now generally available, providing centralized control of SAP and non-SAP agents. In addition, agent mining with SAP Signavio is available now for tracing agent actions, benchmarking against KPIs, and identifying bottlenecks or opportunities for agents to further improve business.
No SAP TechEd without ABAP news
The ABAP journey continues with SAP-ABAP-1, which will be available in the generative AI hub in Q4 2025. Trained on ABAP code, it is designed to build ABAP AI use cases, enabling developers to build smarter, custom AI solutions in modern ABAP code. Dive into the ABAP news in this SAP Community blog.
In addition, ABAP Cloud development is coming to Visual Studio (VS) Code. The new ABAP Cloud extension for VS Code delivers a streamlined, file-based development experience with built-in AI assistance. Powered by an ABAP language server, it will initially support SAP Fiori UI service development and expand to additional ABAP Cloud scenarios over time. This brings ABAP development into the same environment where developers already build with UI5 and CAP. General availability is planned for Q2 2026. Read more in this SAP Community blog.
What’s next: embodied AI and quantum
SAP TechEd is always an opportunity to look to the future. This year, that future includes not just humans, but also autonomous devices, including humanoid robots.
By integrating Joule Agents natively with robots, SAP is bringing business logic into the physical world, enabling a wide range of autonomous devices to operate with enterprise context. We highlighted our strategic partnerships with robotics companies and system integrators to serve customers like Sartorius, Bitzer, and Matur Fompak, demonstrating how our expanding physical AI ecosystem enables robots to understand business processes and execute complex tasks autonomously.
Early proof-of-concept deployments show Joule successfully integrated with SAP business applications and autonomous systems across asset performance, logistics, field services, and warehouse operations. While still in the pioneering stage, these implementations illustrate how SAP is extending Joule to serve both human users and autonomous devices, shaping the future of enterprise AI.
AI is a new compute paradigm that changes everything. But there is another compute paradigm on the horizon: quantum computing. It’s early days, but SAP is driving the future of enterprise computing with a vision to help businesses get ready for quantum computing.
SAP is not building quantum hardware; instead, we are focusing on creating quantum algorithms for business applications. These solutions are simple to deploy — on when needed, off when not — and are designed to be hardware-agnostic, collaborating with partners such as IBM to ensure seamless integration without re-platforming. This approach will enable organizations to unlock operational efficiency and drive better business results at enterprise scale.
I couldn’t be more excited about what’s next for our customers’ future as we bring SAP’s AI-native architecture to life.
Philipp Herzig is CTO of SAP.
SAP TechEd: Read news, stories, and coverage from the event
In 2025, the consumer packaged goods (CPG) sector finds itself in a sticky situation. Companies across the category are facing mounting pressures on both the front and back ends of their operations — from rising costs and shifting trade policy to evolving consumer expectations and eroding brand loyalty.
Exceed diverse consumer expectations to grow sustainably and profitably in an uncertain world
Few industries feel this dual pressure more than American candy makers, particularly during this year’s Halloween season — their single most important sales moment of the year.
Unfortunately, this year the spookiest season proved to be a particularly tricky one. According to FinanceBuzz, candy prices rose by 17% from 2024 to 2025. Price increases pose a threat to legacy brands, as 26% of American consumers say they can no longer afford brand loyalty, according to the 2025 SAP Emarsys Customer Loyalty Index.
For confectionery manufacturers that have long relied on emotional connection and nostalgia to sustain sales, this Halloween season created pressures on the front- and back-end, leading to what’s effectively called the “CPG squeeze.”
Yet, there’s still room for optimism. The bottom line is that consumer demand hasn’t disappeared; it’s simply evolving. While this Halloween season presented a scare, candy makers can prepare for upcoming moments like the holiday season and Valentine’s Day by integrating financial, commercial, and supply chain planning as well as by connecting sourcing, production, logistics, marketing, and retail.
Supplier side reality
Behind the fun-size bars and Halloween packaging, U.S. candy makers grappled with operational headwinds this year. Volatile trade policy made ingredient and packaging costs unpredictable, while global disruptions reverberated through supply chains.
In anticipation, manufacturers stockpiled inventory and restructured supplier networks, tying up working capital and putting additional stress on already thin margins. The loss of supplier stability has also become a defining feature of today’s CPG landscape: 70% of companies report switching suppliers primarily due to cost considerations, and fewer than one in four (22%) have maintained supplier relationships longer than five years, according to data from SAP Emarsys.
For candy makers dependent on commodities like sugar, cocoa, and dairy, these disruptions hit particularly hard. Add that to the growing costs of packaging, transportation, and marketing, and even iconic brands found themselves squeezed from all sides.
Cautious consumers and the erosion of loyalty
On the consumer front, the loyalty that once defined relationships with classic candy brands began to show signs of strain. That’s bad news for staple brands that have long relied on customers who instinctively reach for the same branded candy every Halloween.
At the same time, social media has amplified product discovery. Trends can shift overnight, and a viral post about a new flavor or an unexpected candy collaboration can sway younger buyers instantly. For established brands, loyalty must now be earned continuously.
Halloween was one example of this shift, but we’re going to see families purchase fewer products or mix traditional favorites with lower-priced alternatives in the future as Americans continue to tighten their budgets. Meanwhile, retailers will face uncertain demand and fluctuating supplier costs, leading to a greater risk of stockouts. These trends highlight why CPG companies need smarter, more connected planning to stay ahead of shifting consumer behavior.
Stopping the squeeze with end-to-end connected planning
The effect of the CPG squeeze during this Halloween season offers candy makers valuable lessons before future moments of peak demand. Companies that continue to operate with fragmented data risk missing critical insights, whether it’s an emerging cost spike, a change in trade policy or a social trend that could make or break sales.
That’s why CPG companies must embrace end-to-end business planning, a holistic approach that aims to enable agility, transparency and collaboration across every stage of the value chain, through the following methods:
1. Integrated supply and demand planning
Using AI-driven analytics and real-time data, companies can more accurately balance supply and demand, ensuring they produce the right amount of product at the right time. For candy makers, that means having adjusted holiday production runs in response to early season buying trends or ingredient cost shifts.
This model helps connect supplier, logistics, and retail data streams, allowing teams to react instantly to cost spikes or sales slowdowns — helping CPGs improve forecast accuracy for tomorrow’s disruptions today.
2. Collaborative commercial and promotions planning
Integrating sales, marketing and trade promotion data with supply and finance planning helps maximize promotional ROI. Deloitte reports that 68% of CPG companies are simplifying or otherwise improving their organizational structure to improve coordination between teams, leading to fewer out-of-stocks and stronger seasonal performance.
To make these efforts more effective, companies must turn to revenue growth management as a strategic link between planning and execution. By connecting ROI, volume, and profit and loss data, SAP Revenue Growth Management ensures promotions are timed and tailored to shopper needs. This approach supports customer retention, attracts new buyers, and helps maintain healthy margins.
The coordination of holiday campaigns, shelf placements, and promotional pricing with a unified view of inventory and demand is crucial. Rather than running separate marketing and logistics calendars, teams must collaborate around a single version of truth, ensuring the product featured in a viral ad is available on shelves.
3. Financial planning and scenario modeling
End-to-end planning also allows companies to simulate “what-if” scenarios by modeling policy changes, supply shortages, or demand surges to test resilience. For example, a candy maker facing a 10% increase in imported cocoa costs can immediately assess how to reallocate budgets through promotional adjustments, sourcing alternatives, or margin management.
With real-time connectivity across teams, financial forecasts can automatically update as assumptions shift, empowering decision-makers to pivot fast.
Turning pressure into opportunity
The “CPG squeeze” wasn’t just a momentary market condition; it’s a structural shift that will reshape how candy makers and other CPG brands operate for years to come.
Halloween this year delivered more tricks than treats for American candy makers. Rising costs, shifting loyalties and supply challenges exposed the fragility of traditional planning models. To weather the holidays ahead, all CPGs must embrace integrated planning models that connect every part of the value chain.
With greater visibility and agility to anticipate change and respond to consumer demand, CPG brands can make every holiday a little sweeter.
Jon Dano is an industry executive advisor for Consumer Products at SAP.
Subscribe to the SAP News Center newsletter to get stories and highlights delivered straight to your inbox each week
With the help of SAP AppHaus Network partner Flexso, Belgian steel wire producer Bekaert created a new AI Master Data Assistant with SAP AI Core in SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), and SAP SuccessFactors solutions.
Bekaert aspires to become a people- and data-driven company. This requires a thorough strategic and cultural transformation, in which artificial intelligence plays a crucial role. To get started, the company set priorities, leveraging the embedded AI capabilities already available in its existing HR solutions such as SAP SuccessFactors solutions. By focusing on a few embedded AI use cases and creating a stand-alone AI tool on top of that, it started exploring and seeing the AI benefits.
“AI is a means to achieve our goals, a logical extension of our HR strategy,” says Jorn Waterschoot, global head of HR Technology at Bekaert. “AI’s growing capabilities, cost-effectiveness, and versatility are transforming businesses by enhancing user experiences, enabling experimentation, and encouraging adoption. At Bekaert, these strengths are leveraged in HR while carefully managing hidden costs and focusing on end-to-end implementation to maximize AI’s potential. At Bekaert, the goal is to make AI feel like a candy store: once employees experience its versatility, they are encouraged to explore it further.”
Together with its long-standing partner and SAP AppHaus Network member Flexso, Bekaert worked along a human-centered approach to innovation to identify opportunities and use cases. One of these identified use cases was a stand-alone AI tool that Bekaert used for HR data improvement. This tool was not integrated in the existing software landscape and required of users to extract and import data.
To improve this laborious process, Flexso helped design and build a custom AI solution, called AI Master Data Assistant, with the help of SAP AI Core in SAP Business Technology Platform. This new solution has been fully integrated with SAP SuccessFactors solutions, using SAP Integration Suite. Currently, the solution uses a specific AI model from generative AI hub in SAP AI Core. However, the flexibility with various models offered through the generative AI hub capability would allow the partner to use another AI model for this solution in the future.
Who benefits from AI in HR at Bekaert?
The AI Master Data Assistant allows the Bekaert HR teams to enhance data quality by automatically identifying, correcting, and preventing errors in employee records. The assistant can detect inconsistencies, duplicates, and missing information, ensuring that all data is accurate, complete, and up-to-date. In practice, it means that users can enter natural language prompts to get proposals for improvement. Via chat-like conversations, they can standardize formats, correct errors, and validate entries in real time.
For innovation projects, Bekaert usually rolls out new solutions gradually first through a number of role-specific use cases, then deploy them indiscriminately across the organization. For the new AI Master Data Assistant, the HR business partners and HR admin roles benefitted first.
Flexibility for the future
As part of the global SAP AppHaus Network, Flexso always strives for a human-centered and sustainable co-innovation approach with its customers. It is about bringing innovation into the hands of people. David Pierre, AI practice lead at Flexso explains: “The AI world is developing so fast. So, the principle in our solution is that we are AI model agnostic. Today, we are using model GPT to support our use case. But if we have a better model in the future, then we can also switch to other models as they are all supported by SAP BTP.”
Imke Vierjahn is SAP AppHaus communications lead.
Get the latest SAP news delivered to your inbox once a week
A rockstar, a CEO, and a teenager walk into a room. It’s not the start of a joke, but the essence of a decade-long partnership between SAP and We Are Family Foundation (WAFF). Together, they’ve built a model that shows how young leaders can move from token voices to strategy shapers, from climate action to AI regulation. And the results offer practical lessons for every company looking to future-proof their business.
The challenges facing businesses today demand fresh ideas, digital fluency, and bold thinking. These are the qualities youth leaders bring in spades. For more than 20 years, WAFF, co-founded by music legend Nile Rodgers and his lifelong partner Nancy Hunt, has mentored young leaders from more than 100 countries. Over the past decade, WAFF and SAP have partnered to deepen that global impact, moving youth voices from symbolic gestures to central drivers of innovation.
From roundtables where teenagers challenge senior executives, to shaping initiatives at the UN Climate Change Conferences and the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, WAFF and SAP have developed a blueprint for embedding youth-led ideas into corporate strategy, supply chains, and culture while delivering measurable business and societal impact.
Here are five lessons from the collaboration on how intergenerational partnerships unlock value for both business and society.
1. Problems that span generations require leadership that does too
Traditional business models silo generations: executives design the strategy, then hand it down for others to execute. In today’s world, that handoff wastes momentum and risks irrelevance.
WAFF’s 2024 global study, Collaborating Across Generations, found that when senior leaders and young changemakers co-create from the start, ideas are stress-tested in real time. This results in strategies that are bolder, more resilient, and more adaptable to fast-moving challenges.
In short, instead of passing the baton on the final leg, build your strategies together from the starting line.
2. Intergenerational collaboration is a smart strategy
Youth leaders aren’t just “future leaders.” They already bring expertise that legacy teams lack. Digital natives understand platforms, trends, and user behavior instinctively. They also bring the urgency of living through the climate crisis and global inequality.
Take WAFF Youth Leader Arunima Sen, who uses AI to track plastic debris and apply data-driven models to malnutrition. Her work bridges grassroots innovation with scalable solutions, which is exactly the kind of thinking that can de-risk corporate strategies and ensure relevance from day one.
SAP is powering equitable access to economic opportunity, education and employment, and the circular economy
For companies, including youth voices isn’t an act of goodwill; it’s strategic de-risking.
3. Where business, policy, and community align, impact follows
Global challenges cannot be solved in silos. The biggest breakthroughs happen when companies, policymakers, and social entrepreneurs collaborate.
One example is Mozamel Aman, a young Afghan impact entrepreneur and immigrant in Germany, who built StartSteps to create inclusive employment pathways. In 2023, he began a partnership with SAP Germany connecting women to the opportunity for tech jobs in the SAP ecosystem, blending corporate support with government stipends. His organization leverages government stipends from the Bundesagentur für Arbeit (Federal Employment Agency) to train unemployed individuals and connect them with job opportunities.
Germany’s technical talent gap is nearly the same size as its unemployed refugee population. Partnerships like this solve social challenges while closing critical business gaps in talent and innovation.
4. Purpose, profit, and the power of inclusion
Authentic inclusion of young experts, especially Gen-Zs, builds credibility, trust, and stronger business performance.
Employees notice:
Engagement:Only 31% of U.S. employees were engaged in 2024, the lowest level in a decade.
Retention risk: Employees who feel aligned with their company’s mission and values are much more likely to stay, while misalignment drives turnover.
Business impact: Highly engaged employees drive up to 21% higher profitability.
WAFF’s global study findings underscore these statistics, indicating that young people see inclusivity and accountability as non-negotiable factors. By authentically including youth, organizations set a standard of purpose that fuels stronger engagement, deeper loyalty, and, ultimately, higher profitability.
5. Strategic procurement for social good
The most powerful financial corporate tool for change isn’t in giving, but perhaps in spending.
SAP Business Network facilitates US$6.1 trillion in annual commerce. Compare that to an average corporate social responsibility (CSR) budget of $12 million among FTSE 100 companies, and the potential is clear: redirecting even a fraction of procurement spend toward youth-led, sustainable enterprises can transform impact at scale.
Watson Institute, with leadership from former WAFF alumni, James Okina, has recently published a new research report on the opportunity for young social entrepreneurs in impact-led procurement. The report found that young, impact-driven entrepreneurs who succeed in selling to corporations report an average revenue increase of $170,187.50, while those who fail to secure deals lose between $7,000 and $300,000 in potential revenue. Okina offers that he “doesn’t understand why youth involvement in business is still so controversial.” SAP and WAFF agree. By integrating expert impact entrepreneurs who happen to be young into procurement pipelines, for example, companies embrace innovation and align with corporate goals and values while maintaining quality, price, and performance. It is a smarter, systemic approach than writing philanthropic checks.
A blueprint for the next decade
Over the past decade, SAP and WAFF have shown that partnering with young impact leaders creates a true competitive edge.
Companies that co-create with the next generation design strategies that are bolder, more relevant, and more sustainable. They build workforces that are engaged, trusted, and innovative. They align business goals with societal needs in ways that deliver measurable results—and, across generations, they operate on longer runways to implement lasting solutions.
Businesses that win in the next decade won’t just listen to youth; they will build with them. And that’s smart business.
Jennifer Beason is global director of Corporate Social Responsibility at SAP. Annie Greene and Jamie Roach are global program leads at We Are Family Foundation.
Connect with us on LinkedIn to stay up-to-date with all things SAP
